The FAR Council has proposed pulling the federal government's scattered supply-chain and information-security prohibitions into one place, consolidating rules that contractors now hunt for across multiple FAR parts into a new Part 40. The proposed rule, FAR Case 2026-001, appeared in the Federal Register on June 23, 2026, and rewrites FAR Parts 1, 2, 4, 33, 39, 40, and 53. Comments are due before July 23, 2026.
Background
FAR Case 2026-001 is one of four rulemakings published together on June 23, 2026 as part of the "Revolutionary FAR Overhaul," a package revising roughly 20 FAR parts to implement Executive Order 14275, "Restoring Common Sense to Federal Procurement." The overhaul's stated aim is to strip the FAR down toward statute-only requirements, remove duplicative mandates, and hand contracting officers more discretion. Where companion cases in the same batch address other corners of the acquisition process, Case 2026-001 targets the connective tissue of the FAR itself: definitions, certifications, security prohibitions, bid-protest procedures, and the forms that bind it all together.
The supply-chain prohibitions being consolidated were enacted piecemeal over roughly a decade. Section 889 of the FY2019 NDAA barred covered telecommunications and video-surveillance equipment from named Chinese firms. The Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Security Act (FASCSA) created an exclusion-and-removal process for risky products and sources. Later additions banned the TikTok application on contractor devices used for government work and prohibited certain covered foreign-made drones. Each arrived as a separate clause and certification, scattered across FAR Part 4 and elsewhere, leaving contractors to reconcile overlapping requirements.
Key Details
The proposed rule reorganizes those prohibitions into a unified information- and supply-chain-security framework. Parts 39 and 40 absorb the controlled unclassified information (CUI) safeguarding requirements, Section 889, FASCSA exclusions, the TikTok ban, and the covered-drone prohibitions. The rule relocates security requirements and prohibitions out of FAR Part 4 and into the new Part 40, so that a single part governs how the government addresses supply-chain and information-security risk.
Part 4 itself is pared back. The proposed rule reduces the number of contractor certifications required in the System for Award Management (SAM), trimming the recurring representations companies must complete to remain eligible for award. The FAR Council frames the reduction as removing duplicative or non-statutory attestations rather than relaxing the underlying legal prohibitions, which remain in force through the consolidated Part 40 framework.
Two structural changes reach beyond supply-chain policy. Part 1 establishes a five-year sunset for FAR requirements not mandated by statute or executive order, meaning such rules would lapse unless affirmatively renewed. And Part 53, which houses the FAR's standard forms, is eliminated outright, with the forms relocated to Subpart 1.6 and maintained online to avoid future rulemaking for routine updates. The effect is to compress the regulation's architecture and force periodic justification of any requirement Congress did not mandate.
Part 33 revises bid-protest handling. The proposed rule requires protests to be reported to the heads of contracting activities and authorizes agencies to provide protesters with redacted copies of evaluation records. That reporting-and-disclosure structure shifts more protest activity and visibility to the agency level rather than relying solely on external forums.
The rule carries a 30-day comment window, closing July 23, 2026 — a compressed period given the breadth of the changes across seven FAR parts and the volume of underlying statutory programs being reorganized.
What It Means for Contractors
For compliance teams, consolidation cuts both ways. Locating Section 889, FASCSA, TikTok, and drone prohibitions in one part should reduce the cross-referencing that current FAR structure demands and make it easier to map obligations to a single source. But consolidation is not repeal: the prohibitions themselves survive the move into Part 40. Contractors should not read fewer SAM certifications as fewer underlying duties. A reduced certification load shifts risk from a checkbox at registration to ongoing substantive compliance — companies that previously relied on annual SAM representations to flag obligations will need internal controls that track the prohibitions directly.
The five-year sunset on non-statutory requirements introduces planning uncertainty. Requirements that lapse and are renewed, or lapse and disappear, will change the clause landscape on a rolling basis, so contractors building long-term compliance programs should track which obligations rest on statute and which on FAR discretion. The relocation of forms from Part 53 to Subpart 1.6 is largely administrative, but proposal and contract-management templates that cite Part 53 form numbers will need updating.
The Part 33 protest changes warrant attention from any contractor that protests awards or defends them. Mandatory reporting to heads of contracting activities raises the internal profile of protests, and the option for agencies to release redacted evaluation records could give protesters more insight into how the government scored competing proposals — a potential benefit to challengers and a new disclosure consideration for awardees.
Because Case 2026-001 is paired with companion rules that reduce mandatory clauses and expand contracting-officer discretion, contractors should weigh the package as a whole rather than rule by rule. The 30-day comment period closing July 23, 2026 is the window to flag operational concerns — particularly any ambiguity in how the consolidated Part 40 framework maps to existing Section 889 and FASCSA compliance programs — before the framework moves toward a final rule. Trade associations and large primes are likely to file detailed comments on the supply-chain consolidation and the certification cuts, and subcontractors should review whether flow-down obligations change under the reorganized structure.
